Kris Stadelman, executive director of NOVA in Sunnyvale, was just ‘doing her job,’ so she was surprised to learn she’d been recently selected for the “Friend of Mission College” award.
Stadelman leads NOVA, a federally funded employment and training agency that provides customer-focused workforce development services. Because workers often change jobs in Silicon Valley, Stadelman says that NOVA’s purpose is to “help people transition from opportunity to opportunity.”
Mission College President Laurel Jones views NOVA and Kris Stadelman more as collaborative friends than business partners, which prompted her to nominate Stadelman for the 2012 “Friend of Mission College” award, presented in April at the college’s “Best of the Best” celebration. “Beyond NOVA’s curriculum recommendations for colleges, they also focus on technology, just as Mission College does, so our working relationship could not be more simpatico,” says Jones.
NOVA’s Career Pathways Initiative, along with the Mission College Center for Technology and Innovation (MC2IT), strive to meet the greater North Valley workforce training needs, fill in where there are gaps, and share resources where there are overlaps. As Stadelman describes it, “NOVA is a very different, non-standard government bureaucracy — nimble and agile. Customer success means everything to us as we reflect the local economy — Silicon Valley.”
Serving seven cities – Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Santa Clara, Cupertino and Milpitas with Sunnyvale as the host city – NOVA recognizes that they, together with Mission College, have a common goal, with a shared vision; both optimize resources to find solutions.
For more information about NOVA, visit www.novaworks.org.
For more information about Mission College’s MC2IT, visit www.missioncollege.org/foundation/mc2it.html.